Life cycles

Jody and I decided to anchor in a very small and tucked away bay on the island of Tahaa in the Society Islands of French Polynesia. For the previous two months we’d had visitors who’d flown in to sail with us, and all of a sudden we found ourselves, just the two of us, with nothing to do in paradise.

In the morning we took the dinghy ashore tying up to a small wooden pier on the shore. We wandered about a quarter mile up the gravel road to where we found a small store.They didn’t speak English, and we didn’t speak French, but there was no communication problem. They smiled, we smiled, and we walked through their small store. They didn’t have much to offer. Just some basics. However, on the counter there was a plate filled with fresh homemade sugar donuts.We grabbed a couple and wandered leisurely back to the LOST SOUL.

I remember kicking back there on the foredeck of the boat. The sun was just starting to get warm and we were surrounded by lush tropical growth on the shore, as we munched on those great sugar donuts.

I couldn’t even remember what “real life” was like. We sat there talking about what people back home might be doing, trying to remember what it had been like. I remember thinking how it all seemed as if our past life had been a bad dream, a nightmare.

How could people live like that, we wondered? Why would they? Many months later, when we returned from that voyage,we stopped to visit our friends and families. We told stories of our adventures, and had countless slide parties where we would recount the adventures and the misadventures.

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